Os grandiosos e caríssimos projectos de Santiago Calatrava começam a causar grande polémica e contestação . Custos de execução de projectos mal preparados funcionalmente e técnicamente, que muitas triplicam os orçamentos iniciais levando a sobrecustos absolutamente incomportáveis, estão a enegrecer e a desacreditar a imagem deste membro do Star System, e a confirmar com indignação a megalomania autista e egocêntrica de vários membros do Star System na Arquitectura Internacional.
Em Espanha já existe mesmo uma página de Facebook dirigida ao caso de Valencia
"Calatrava te la Clava, es un grupo que nació ante la
indignación del sobrecoste de la Ciudad de las Ciencias, Comunitat Valenciana."
Nós, por cá temos o caso do Novo Museu dos Coches:
Ver : "Construção do novo Museu dos
Coches. Abertura do novo Museu dos Coches ... RESPONSÁVEIS !? "/ http://ovoodocorvo.blogspot.nl/2013/09/construcao-do-novo-museu-dos-coches.html
ou :
ou :
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| TROUBLE IN UTOPIA ?!? Vicissitudes do "Génio" na Cosmologia do Star System ... |
Spanish Opera House to Lose Crumbling Facade by Star Architect
By RAPHAEL MINDERJAN. 12, 2014/ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/13/world/europe/spanish-opera-house-to-lose-crumbling-facade-by-star-architect.html?ref=international&_r=1
MADRID — In the latest development in the ongoing travails of Santiago Calatrava, the Spanish architect, construction workers are due to start removing the crumbling mosaic facade of Valencia’s opera house on Monday.
The structural problems of the Queen Sofía Palace of the Arts, which has been closed since last month because of a risk of falling tiles, is the latest controversy surrounding the work of Mr. Calatrava. The opera house, one of his flagship projects, is at the heart of the massive City of Arts and Sciences complex that Mr. Calatrava designed to help transform his native city of Valencia.
RELATED COVERAGE
At the City of Arts and Sciences, a huge project by Santiago Calatrava in Valencia, Spain, work is under way to fix problems that have cropped up since the project was built.A Star Architect Leaves Some Clients FumingSEPT. 24, 2013
Mr. Calatrava covered the opera house with thousands of tiny mosaic tiles, using a technique made famous over a century earlier by Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona. But the Valencia authorities threatened to sue Mr. Calatrava last month after chunks fell off in high winds, forcing the closing of the building ahead of Christmas performances and the cancellation next month of Puccini’s “Manon Léscaut,” directed by Plácido Domingo.
Máximo Buch, an official from Valencia’s regional government responsible for economic affairs, on Friday announced that Mr. Calatrava and the building companies responsible for the opera house had agreed to remove the fragile tiles and cover the cost of the repair work, estimated at around 3 million euros, or $4 million. Instead of replacing the mosaic tiles, the building is to be painted white, at least as a temporary solution to allow the opera to reopen and resume its season late next month.
A spokesman for Mr. Calatrava said late Sunday that the cause of the problems was unknown. The spokesman added that Mr. Calatrava and the construction companies were working together “to ensure the safety of visitors, minimize disruption to the opera house schedule and reach a permanent solution to the mosaic surfacing.”
One of Mr. Calatrava’s other projects, the PATH subway station in Lower Manhattan, is close to completion. But Mr. Calatrava has recently also made the headlines because of problems linked to his past projects, either because of budget overruns or construction defects.
Valencia’s opera house opened eight years ago. Since then, the City of Arts and Sciences has added significantly to Valencia’s mountain of debt, at a time when Spain has been struggling on the front line of the euro crisis. Originally budgeted at €300 million, the complex — the world’s largest collection of Mr. Calatrava’s work, which also includes a performance hall, a bridge, a planetarium, and a science museum — ended up costing three times as much. Mr. Calatrava was paid about €94 million for the project.
Separately, Mr. Calatrava is in court because of cost overruns at a footbridge in Venice. The owners of a winery that Mr. Calatrava built in the Álava region of Spain are also suing him because of a leaking roof.
September 24, 2013
A Star Architect Leaves Some Clients Fuming
By SUZANNE DALEY in The new York Times / http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/25/arts/design/santiago-calatrava-collects-critics-as-well-as-fans.html?ref=suzannedaley&_r=0&pagewanted=print
VALENCIA, Spain — For a while, this sprawling Mediterranean
city embraced Santiago Calatrava’s architecture with gusto. In a dried-up
riverbed, Mr. Calatrava built and built, eventually filling 86 acres with his radical,
and some say awe-inspiring, designs.
But these days, even as Mr. Calatrava’s eye-catching PATH
station creeps toward completion in Lower Manhattan, he is often cast as a
villain here in Valencia. One local politician runs a Web site called
Calatravatelaclava, which loosely translates as, “Calatrava bleeds you dry.”
Originally budgeted at 300 million euros (about $405
million), the riverbed complex, called the City of Arts and Sciences — the
world’s largest collection of Mr. Calatrava’s work, which includes a
performance hall, a bridge, a planetarium, an opera house, a science museum, a
covered walkway and acres of reflecting pools — has cost nearly three times
that much, money the region never had.
Ignacio Blanco, the member of the provincial Parliament who
started the Web site, has unleashed a flood of information about the complex
during the past year, concluding that Valencia still owes 700 million euros
(about $944 million) on it.
Mr. Calatrava was paid approximately 94 million euros (about
$127 million) for his work. How could that be, Mr. Blanco asks, when the opera
house included 150 seats with obstructed views? Or when the science museum was
initially built without fire escapes or elevators for the disabled?
“How can you make mistakes like that?” asked Mr. Blanco, a
member of the small opposition United Left party here, who said millions were
spent to fix such errors. “He was paid even when repairing his own mistakes.”
Along with Frank Gehry, Richard Meier, Renzo Piano and
Norman Foster, Mr. Calatrava swept to prominence in an era of showstopping
architecture. Across the globe, he has designed dozens of structures, almost
invariably white, including the Liège-Guillemins railway station in Belgium;
the Turning Torso skyscraper in Malmo, Sweden; and the Milwaukee Art Museum,
with its mechanical roof.
A Devotion to Form
Admirers say that Mr. Calatrava’s designs are both delicate
and powerful. They liken his buildings to giant sculptures and praise his
stubborn devotion to form. And they point out that star architects often come
with hefty price tags, partly because their designs frequently call for
intricate, complicated construction. Almost all have at least one project that
seemed to spin horribly out of control — and it is rarely easy to determine
exactly who might be at fault and for what.
But in numerous interviews, other architects, academics and
builders say that Mr. Calatrava is amassing an unusually long list of projects
marred by cost overruns, delays and litigation. It is hard to find a Calatrava
project that has not been significantly over budget. And complaints abound that
he is indifferent to the needs of his clients. Just last month a Dutch
councilor in Haarlemmermeer, near Amsterdam, urged his colleagues to take legal
action because the three bridges the architect designed for the town cost twice
the budgeted amount and then millions more in upkeep since they opened in 2004.
Mr. Calatrava is already in court over a footbridge in Venice, a winery in the
Álava region of Spain and a massive exhibition and conference center in Oviedo,
Spain.
In Bilbao, Spain, there have been problems with a bridge and
an airport.
“What you see over and over again is that rather than
searching for functionality or customer satisfaction, he aims for singularity,”
said Jesús Cañada Merino, the president of Bilbao’s architects’ association.
“The problem is that Calatrava is above and beyond the client.”
Mr. Calatrava is likely to come under renewed scrutiny in
New York as building continues on one of his latest projects, the new PATH
train station at ground zero. It is expected to open in 2015 but is six years
behind schedule and will cost $4 billion, twice the original budget.
Critics of the project, commissioned by the Port Authority
of New York and New Jersey, find the final price tag hard to believe. (In
January 2012 an independent audit of the Port Authority concluded that the
agency was “a challenged and dysfunctional organization.”) But several executives
who have been involved in construction at the World Trade Center site, who did
not want to speak on the record because of their relationship with the project,
said Mr. Calatrava’s designs were problematic, too, calling for hugely
difficult construction, including a vast underground chamber. In addition, they
said, he demanded that surrounding buildings house all the station’s mechanical
elements, like ventilation, which complicated construction and called for
time-consuming coordination.
The Port Authority declined to discuss the cost overruns and
issued a one-sentence statement: “Early estimates for the transportation hub
were based on conceptual designs and were therefore unrealistic.”
Here in Valencia, the regional government’s spending spree
and Mr. Calatrava’s work are being dissected and disparaged regularly as local
politicians fight over who is responsible for the project’s pile of debt.
Regional officials had hoped that the complex would transform this city into a
tourist destination, in much the way that Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in
Bilbao put that city on the map, and they continue to defend the investment.
But they appeared to draw a line last year when the smooth skin of Mr.
Calatrava’s opera house — some call it the Darth Vader helmet — began
noticeably wrinkling just six years after the building opened.
Regional officials said they expected the responsible party
— Mr. Calatrava, the construction companies or a combination — to pay for
repairs or face a lawsuit. They are working to determine what repairs are
necessary.
When asked about Mr. Calatrava’s projects, his office in New
York, where he lives, said he was unavailable for an interview. He did,
however, issue a statement:
“My goal is always to create something exceptional that
enhances cities and enriches the lives of the people who live and work in
them,” he said. He added, “It has been a privilege to work on these projects,
all of which are completed to the highest standards.”
In recent months he has defended his work in writing in
various publications, saying that his fees in Valencia were fair because they
covered 20 years of work and included some management of the sites.
In a brief interview in Architectural Record magazine last
year, he noted that clients were satisfied enough to come back for more. Among
them are the cities of Dublin and Dallas. In that article, Mr. Calatrava called
the uproar over his work in Valencia “a political maneuver by the Communists.”
But other cities may be reluctant to hire Mr. Calatrava
again.
The Bridge of Broken Legs
In Bilbao he designed a footbridge with a glass tile surface
that allowed it to be lighted from below, keeping its sweeping arches free of
lampposts. But in a city that gets a lot of rain and occasional snow,
pedestrians keep falling on the slippery surface. City officials say some 50
citizens have injured themselves, sometimes breaking legs or hips, on the
bridge since it opened in 1997, and the glass bricks frequently crack and need
to be replaced. Two years ago the city resorted to laying a huge black rubber
carpet across the bridge.
“It loses the beauty, ” said Ibon Areso, the acting mayor of
Bilbao. “But we can’t keep paying people who slip and fall.” In a recent storm
the carpet flipped up, knocking several people off their feet.
On the outskirts of Bilbao, Mr. Calatrava was commissioned
to build an airport terminal that has been nicknamed La Paloma because of its
resemblance to a dove taking flight. But when it opened in 2000, the airport
lacked an arrivals hall. Passengers moved through the customs and baggage area
directly to the sidewalk where they had to wait in the cold. The airport
authorities have since installed a glass wall to shelter them.
In June a Spanish court ruled that Mr. Calatrava and his
team had to pay to 3.3 million euros (about $4.5 million) to settle a dispute
in Oviedo, where the construction of the conference center at one point
suffered a spectacular collapse.
In the Álava region, a winery is suing Mr. Calatrava over an
undulating roof he designed a dozen years ago. Problems with leaks, which ruin
the humidity control that is vital to wine, have never been resolved. The
owners of the winery, Domecq, are asking for 2 million euros (about $2.7
million) to hire fresh architects and engineers to devise a solution.
Auditors in Venice are taking Mr. Calatrava and several
engineers to court because of cost overruns and what they see as an excessive
need for repairs on Mr. Calatrava’s Ponte della Costituzione, a footbridge
across the Grand Canal. The region’s audit court has asked Mr. Calatrava to
return more than a million euros. The first hearing is scheduled for November.
Meanwhile, Venice is also asking judicial authorities to
find out whether Mr. Calatrava was responsible for some cost overruns because
he did not promptly supply the drawings needed to begin finding a builder.
Grand Conceptions
As for Valencia’s cost overruns, the politician Mr. Blanco
said in a recent interview that one contributing issue might be that Mr.
Calatrava’s designs appear to include few details. “Other architects, they know
exactly the door handles they want, and where to buy and at what cost,” Mr.
Blanco said. “But Calatrava is the opposite. His projects do not have this
degree of precision. If you look at the files on the aquarium, which was built
by someone else, they are fat. But there are just a couple of pages on the
Calatrava projects.”
Valencia, where Mr. Calatrava was born, has a lot to regret
now that Spain’s economic boom is over. The regional government, led by the
center-right Popular Party, spent, for instance, about $180 million on a new
airport that has not managed to attract any airlines. And some critics see Mr.
Calatrava’s City of Arts and Sciences as another monument to the government’s
extravagance, not his. Did Valencia really need an opera house, they ask?
But other critics scoff at Mr. Calatrava’s landscaped
gardens beneath metal arches that become so hot no vines will entwine them. The
roof of the performance hall leaks, they say. The opera was once flooded in a
storm. Didn’t he know he was working in a riverbed?
One Valencia architect, Vicente Blasco, has taken Mr. Calatrava
to task in a local newspaper for even trying to cover the steel sides of the
opera house with a mosaic of broken white tiles. (That touch was Mr.
Calatrava’s nod to another noted architect of Spain, Antoni Gaudí, who favored
mosaics.) The flourish may have been a nice idea, Mr. Blasco said, but it was
absurd. The buckling that is now occurring was predictable. On days with a
rapid change in temperature, he wrote, the steel and tile contract and expand
at different rates.
“Maybe someone sold him on some special adhesive, but I
don’t see it,” Mr. Blasco said in an interview. “It is so basic. No one would
expect that to work.”
Rachel Chaundler in Spain and Elisabetta Povoledo in Rome
contributed reporting.
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Mr. Calatrava in New York in 2009 with a model of his design
for a PATH train station at ground zero.
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| Valencia. Calatrava’s City of Arts and Sciences |
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